ance? That's the big question about des-
sert: how do we close out dinner? How
do we finish the meal?"
He had a pensive look, and I couldn't
help asking him about Albert's unmade
dream. His face came alive again. ''You
mean hot ice cream? Yes. Yes! But . . .
it's hard! Ice cream is ice cream because
it's cold. But gelatin is the same way: gel-
atin used to be both gelatin and cold.
There must be some way. We'll solve it.
We will." Then he signed the historical
diagrams "FERRAN ADRIÀ."
A meal at eIBulli-sweet-and-spicy
flash-fried shrimp tortilla, wild
strawberries in wild-hare bouillon-
showed that the French line setting off
savory from sweet could be entirely
bypassed, like other French defensive
lines in history, by mechanical ingenuity,
speed, and superior strategic thinking.
But I was still interested in desserts as
such, pure desserts, desserts that always
ended sweetly. And so the next morning
Lisa and I travelled to meet with the
young Mozart of pastry, Jordi Roca, at
the restaurant he runs with his brothers,
in Girona, in northeast Catalonia, about
an hour from elBulli.
Where elBulli is old-fashioned and
even a little run-down, as though to
frame the hyper-modernity of its plates
all the more sharply, EI Celler de Can
Roca, to give the full name of the Roca
brothers' three-star place, is of exqui-
sitely contemporary design, with small
groves of poplar trees con- r-J
tained within the zigzagged ?t
green -glass walls of the res- . \j
taurant proper. A long, low-
lying wine cellar sits just
across an allée of trees from
the restaurant, and in it Josep
Roca, the second, sommelier
brother-the oldest brother,
Joan, is in the kitchen-keeps
his wines in tenderly nourish-
ing musical environments,
playing recorded melodies in the caves:
Bach for the champagne, romantic cello
music for the Burgundys, and local gui-
tar music for the Spanish wines.
Jordi, the baby brother, is still young-
looking-startlingly so, at thirty-two.
Dreamy of visage and gentle of voice, he
came out of the kitchen before lunch, ten-
tative and eager and even a lime wide-eyed
in his chef whites, to talk about his dessert
56 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 3, 2011
work. He had inherited the pastry station,
he admitted, because it was the younger
brother's station, but he thought that there
was room to grow there. "Desserts in Cat-
alonia don't have the weight of the past,"
he explained, in the French he had learned
during several stages. "We had Crema
Catalana. A cake or two or three. So we
felt free to invent and compete."
After an apprenticeship at elBulli,
he realized that his preoccupation was
with scent. "That was something that
hadn't really been realized enough in des-
serts, I thought: the power of aromas.
We had this new machine that could ex-
tract essential oils, and I began to play
with it. I began making perfumed des-
serts." He laughed. "I went to Sephora
and found the most wonderful aromas
in all the women's perfumes. And I
started making desserts built around
their smells. Calvin Klein-like aromas. I
wanted to make something as wonder-
ful to taste as Chanel perfume was to
smell. For me, that's where all that new
chemistry and equipment help. We have
the machine to extract essential oils.
Another just for smokes. Working with
smokes and smells, this has a-fragile
aspect? Sense memory extends to the
heart of who we are. I think that there's
a freedom there, for a certain delicacy."
He shrugged. "You'll see," he said.
Did he have a dream dessert that he
had tried and failed to perfect? He nod-
ded. ''Yes, there's one I'm working on. I
haven't really . . . perfected it yet. You
see, I'm a big fan ofF.C. Bar-
celona" -the soccer team-
"and I wanted to make a des-
sert that would re-create the
emotions Lionel Messi feels
when he scores a goal." Messi
is the great Argentine striker
who stars for Barcelona. "I feel
I'm close. Could I try it out
on you at the end of lunch?"
The desserts came around.
- And here was the real thing,
here were true desserts: not dancing nim-
bly on the edge between sweet and salty,
like Albert Adrias, but plain old-fash-
ioned sweets touched by the invention
and audacity of a liberated imagination.
There was watermelon rind with bitter
almonds and tarragon; a hot lemon-mint
eucalyptus liquid that, as it was poured,
solidified into a small, sweet iceberg.
Then lemon custard and granita, with
the floral scents in a small cup alongside:
you eat and smell by turns. Lemon zest,
pure distilled mint flowers. And then an
apricot ice-cream bombe with a spun-
sugar shell and apricot foam inside and
an apricot sabayon inside that.
Finally, the server arrives with the
Messi dessert, as J ordi fusses anxiously in
the background. He presents half of a
soccer ball, covered with artificial grass;
the smell of grass perfumes the air. On
the "grass" is a kind of delicately bal-
anced, S-shaped, transparent plastic tee-
ter-totter-like a French curve-with
three small meringues on it, and a larger
white-chocolate soccer ball balancing
them on a protruding platform at the
very end. A white candy netting lies on
the grass near the white-chocolate ball.
Then, with a cat-that-swallowed-
the-canary smile, the server puts a small
MP3 player with a speaker on the table.
He turns it on and nods.
An announcer's voice, excited and
frantic, explodes. Messi is on the move.
"Messi turns and spins!" the announcer
cries, and the roar of the crowd at the
Bernabéu stadium, in Madrid, fills the
table. The server nods, eyes intent. At
the signal, you eat the first meringue.
"Messi is alone on goal!" the an-
nouncer cries. Another nod, you eat
the next scented meringue. "Messi
shoots!" A third nod, you eat the last
meringue, and, as you do, the entire
plastic S-curve, now unbalanced, flips
up and over, like a spring, and the white-
chocolate soccer ball at the end is re-
leased and propelled into the air, high
above the white-candy netting.
" f f " Th
MESS!. GOOOOOAL. e announc-
er's voice reaches a hysterical peak and,
as it does, the white-chocolate soccer
ball drops, strikes, and breaks through
the candy netting into the goal beneath
it, and, as the ball hits the bottom of a
little pit below, a fierce jet of passion-
fruit cream and powdered mint leaves is
released into your mouth, with a trail of
small chocolate pop rocks rising in its
wake. Then the passion-fruit cream
settles, and you eat it all, with the white-
chocolate ball, now broken, in bits
within it.
You feel. . . something of what
Messi must feel: first, the overwhelming
presence of the grass beneath his feet
(he's a short player); then the tentative
elegance of acquired skill, represented